The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Where meaning is

The weather?Indeed it is an outrage, sether Albert, but
there is no remedy.The most powerful on
earth, corporations and their functionary governments, even they are powerless
to reverse the effects of sudden stratospheric warming, even if they cared, and
why should they?They are not standing
in a layby on the Huddersfield ring road, looking for the truth.

Which we are, sethren.Enough of weather.

We are still looking at demons,
for demons are at the heart of the matter.But before we nail a demon, there is a confusion to be tied up.Language, words, all that stuff that vibrates
through the air and the non-existent ether, all the stuff that is locked up in
the dark in closed books or in the entrails of a Kindle or a laptop, and of
which there is an abundant store in all our heads, or most of them; language is
different from demons.Language is
merely coded allusion.Note, sethren, I
said allusion, not illusion, though it can be that too.Language is a sort of signalling system,
flashing lights, waving flags, between the little universes in our skulls, each
our own ideoverse.In prehistory, language
was always instantaneous, but in time, writing could freeze it, or more truly petrify
it, or paint it onto flat surfaces with ink, and nowadays language can travel
through little electrical switches, on or off, 0 or 1, to be or not to be, in
the beginning was the word, by the waters of Babylon, in the Dreamtime they
wandered the earth, I entered the holy land of Kurukshetra.All flag waving, a way of getting stuff from
one of us to another.“But what’s the
stuff?” you cry out with one voice.You
cry out with one voice.Thank you sether Pritchard-Achebe-Wajda, one
voice will have to do.

The stuff — is meaning.Meaning.I know, I know.That way lies
endless circularity.

Let me approach it this way.

Of course.Of.Course.Each of these is a
word.The word of suggests a relationship.The word course suggests some
sort of progression, a cross country race, the journey of one's life, an associated
but conditional something or other of a river.

We could go on for a long time,
but it’s the two words together that I’m looking at here.Of
course. It can suggest that:

We all accept that x is axiomatic.

The group I am about to refer to
are in error (“Of course, some people think…)

Most certainly.

Certainly not (“Of course” said with a
quizzical, ironic smile).

What else can I say? (“Do you
love me?”“Of course.”)

I do realise that reservations
would be in order here (“Of course there is the Bayesian analysis to be taken into
account.”) — No idea, sether Constance, it is possible to use words without
having a clear understanding of what they mean.Try reading some science journalists, let alone economists.

Do you think I’m entirely stupid
(“Of course I knew that.”

Enough.What this makes clear is that words and
phrases do not have meanings.What they
do is to make connections, physical, material connections, through the ear, to
a bit of the brain with a fancy name which is clearly interconnected with all
the other bits of the brain in one way or another, and thence onwards to that
infinite network where meaning exists.I read only today that one human brain processes
300,000 petabytes of data a year.I
think that’s 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but I was never so good at the
counting, especially all those zeros.A
lot anyway.Of course a lot of a lot
will be repetitive; hello, sorry, excuse me, fuck off, that kind of thing, but
even those have considerable amounts of meaning lurking behind their black and
white exteriors.So that infinite 4D
network in the brain where meaning exists may have loops and recursiveness
about it, but it’s still infinite.And
each infinite network of meaning, each ideoverse, is connected, physically
connected, in any way we can possible understand physics, to every other
infinite network of meaning, every other ideoverse, literally, physically
connected (just check this; take these words as they get into your brain,
electromagnetically through the eye, and check the physical continuity from the
brain of Brother Jero.If not, how else
did Jero get there?).And this continuum
between each and every ideoverse (each one unique) and between all those
ideoverses and the universe, we might call the metaverse, the space where all infnities of
meaning exist.

I just want to make it clear,
sethren, that I am not labouring under a delusion here.I am not proposing a metaphysical entity
(nothing so disturbing, sether Albert).I am merely suggesting that meaning is distributed, not to be found in
one place, and that physical objects are part of the location of meaning, an
actual chair, an actual Higgs boson, all are loci of meaning, demons fly out of
them as well as into them (I name this pad, i-)

Hunger, sethren, hunger calls you
I see.What is the meaning of
horse?Last week, scandal that the poor
were fed on the slurry blasted from the noble beast’s guts and bones, and this
week the beneficiaries of our pluto-fascist kleptocracy are eating the best
cuts of Arabian Thoroughbred in the best restaurants of the metropolis.Subway, is it?Till tomorrow.Tomorrow we will try to see a demon with the
naked eye.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.